TAKING THE FUTURE MORE SERIOUSLY: FROM CORPORATE FORESIGHT TO "FUTURE-MAKING"

Fergnani's (2022) conceptualization of corporate foresight as a dynamic capability aims to direct scholars toward examinations of the management of the future. Although this aim is venerable, I contend that the advanced conceptualization undermines this aim in two ways. First, when conceptualized as a dynamic capability, corporate foresight represents an ideal that overstates firms' abilities to manage the future-potentially even with doubtful implications for policy-makers in the face of doomsday scenarios. Second, this conceptualization downplays the future, rather than putting it center stage. In response to these conceptual fallacies, I propose practice-based examinations of "future-making" as a more promising platform for focusing attention on how actors actually, rather than ideally, engage with the future. This, then, calls on management scholars to take the future more seriously as an important but underresearched temporal category, and offers a more solid foundation for designing policy initiatives that aim to grow firms' preparedness for doomsday scenarios.